Video: Minimum Wage Debate Reaches Britain

In this 6-minute video, Helen Pattison, an organizer for Youth Fight for Jobs and a member of the Socialist Party (Socialist Alternative’s sister organization in England and Wales), debates raising the minimum wage with a representative of the right-wing American think-tank Employment Policies Institute. Earlier this year, Youth Fight for Jobs, the Bakers’ Union, and others launched the Fast Food Rights coalition which organized protests across Britain in solidarity with striking fast food workers in the USA.

(Note: When the speakers refer to “zero-hour contracts,” they are are referring to the five and a half million workers in Britain who are employed in jobs with no guaranteed hours. These zero-hour contracts give bosses greater power, while workers have to struggle with unreliable, inadequate income.)

Socialist Alternative is a national organization fighting in our workplaces, communities, and campuses against the exploitation and injustices people face every day. We are community activists fighting against budget cuts in public services; we are activists campaigning for a $15 an hour minimum wage and fighting, democratic unions; we are people of all colors speaking out against racism and attacks on immigrants, students organizing against tuition hikes and war, women and men fighting sexism and homophobia.